Three Ring Circus

Tragedy

On Friday, I finally got around to seeing Shine. The Oscar-winning film is supposedly about the resurrection of a brilliant (Jewish) child pianist who, having been incapacitated by his father's Holocaust-induced mental abuse, later in life makes a triumphal return to the stage.

It is not about that. It is about death.

This fact hit me in the final scene of Shine, which is a true story, when the aged prodigy, whose name is David Helfgott, visits his late father's grave site. David says he feels nothing, and rightly so. His father was a royal bastard, forcing him to remain in his native Australia after being offered a scholarship to study in America and attempting the same strategy upon his acceptance at the Royal Academy in London.

David went north despite his father disowning him.

But David was crippled. He could not function forever without parental acceptance because of both his genuine love for his father as well as a sort of sadomasochistic conditioning. David died.

"David" was still alive, sputtering his words and playing at the piano. But David had passed on after childhood.

At the cemetery, "David" mourned his father and himself.

Tragicomedy

On Saturday, I caught the final performance of "Cantata 2000," this year's Visiting Director's Project which played on the Loeb Mainstage. I wasn't been sure what I was getting into. (Actually, I thought it was a Spanish dance show.) But it turned out to be a musical in the vein of "Rent," interspersed with monologues. I say in the vein of "Rent," because it dealt with similar issues of sexuality, identity and technology on a pop-music soundtrack. But "Cantata 2000" was better than "Rent." By a long shot.

"Cantata 2000" was the best piece of work to have shown at Harvard in the last three years. The talented student cast delivered their own diatribes, as if they were written for a Forensics League contest "Picture the Millennium." Among the smartest was the entry from Dani D. Krasner '97, a feminist rant which evoked her frustration with below-grade men in painfully high-noted terms. Another excellent piece, "Something to Tell You," written by Visiting Director Elizabeth Swados, was a love song in which a male bisexual and female bisexual reveal their orientations to each other at the same time as their "love."

Now my definition of "love" does not count the "one" as "one among many," as these two bisexuals were all too pleased to do. And in their insincerity, I detected the root of the show, what made it so successful, and why it resonated. "Cantata 2000" represented the artistic high point of the undistracted sense of irony that pervades our culture. In the singers' voices, I heard moments of beauty. But in their words, I understood no appreciation for the real. Even in the staged poetry lounge, the poet becomes a vehicle for nonsense, and then an object for beating.

Comedy

On Monday, I attended the Dunster House housing lottery in which I was, of course, a participant. It was my last such lottery, so despite my vested interest, I took the time to sit back and observe.

Certainly, there was tension in the air--everybody's future was at stake. Those "number-one" shrieks were matched in intensity only by the tacit sorrow of their unlucky counterparts.

It was entertaining, though perhaps I found it so only because my rooming group scored first choice in our category. It was also refreshing to see the unconsidered honesty in the room, though the relative insignificance of the subject matter gave it a humorous air.

Joshua A. Kaufman's column appears on alternate Wednesdays.